Our Constitution
is in trial our prison houses, our cultural credentials are tested behind stone
walls and iron bars, our penal panaceas are in peril, what with the deterrent
no return and reinvest escalation despite long incarceration. The law can not
hang limp but must lash out to restore order, correct deviance and stabilize
that personal integrity which is the best guarantee of behavioral normality
and societal harmony. Barbarity in sentence and torture in prison are a trend,
which aggravates the malady, and so self-defeating that punitive cruelty is
a curative futility and preventive disutility. From a practical angle, criminologists
have concluded that benumbing, long prison terms and inflictions within the
walled campuses are ineffective drugs in the penological pharmacopoeia.

Therefore, a reformative
philosophy rehabilitative strategy. Therapeutic prison treatment and enlivening
of prisoners personality through a technology of fostering the fullness of being
such a creative art of social defense and correctional process activating fundamental
guarantees of prisoners rights, is the hopeful hope of national prison policy
struck by the Constitution and the Court. This is my thesis but I must urge
my case and establish the justice of this policy. Tersely put, the State must
discover and engineer the high way to human rehabilitation and put into practice
in the prison system.

At this point we
may begin with the basic question: Do we have a national prison justice policy?
To be honest, the Raj had a prison programme at the service of its imperial
policy, but the Republic, with all its boasts and all its hopes, has no penal
policy, no prison humanism, no jail justice, even though almost every Minister
who was wielded power, regardless of party, has suffered incarceratory laptism.
Regrettably, the judiciary has a parrot like carried over precedents of Victorian
Vintage being innocent of progressive penological thought and the nexus of Constitutional
values with prison praxis. Judicial illiteracy about criminology rehabilitative
technology and of the Courts responsibility in purposeful sentencing projects
and restorative penitentiary procedures is appalling.

On the legislative
font, the less said the better. In a country where the majority of the legislatures
have served a jail spell almost as a qualification for candidacy, is not surprising
that the prisoners Act, 1894, confiding the repressive policy of White hall,
continues "red in tooth and claw", crime Gandhi, come freedom, come
constitution. The harassing and hamstringing traditions validated by Prison
manuals, are preserved thoughtlessly, decades after prisoner patriots assumed
power. (wearing Gandhi Cap is, under the Punjab Jail manual, a Jail office even
now.) Parliamentary apathy is matched by executive insouciance. Of course, at
seminars and conferences, ghost speechwriters cover up Ministers conscience
with glittering inaugural exhortations and even policy formulations. And at
criminological workshops, the academia's, never taken seriously by the politician,
the bureaucratic, the judge and the warden who alone matter in executing prison
justice.

seriously by the
politician, the bureaucrat, the judge and the warden who alone matter in executing
prison justice .Thus, the battle for a national policy on pri-sons and imprisonment
has been lost by apathy, in-sensitivity and 'eminent' ignorance.

The people-the
political swashbucklers and pro-fessional jargon-mongers apart, are unaware,
doped by hopes, and are inertly irresponsive to the sentencing mystiques. If
only a human transformation inside the walled world of offenders were planned
and exe-cuted, through a circumsect yet intelligent project to invigorate benignly
the inner man in custody, a crime-free society, why, a prison-less State may
dawn in the distance, given creative courage and national vision in perspective
of human values. This is not a moony ideal but largely practical, as several
social scientists and sublime pragmatists claim. I know, every science has been
an outcaste. I may sound un-orthodox but orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world
of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

Among the three
alternatives, the retributive, the deterrant and the rehabilitative, modern
penologists opt for the last with a sprinkling of the second. To be retributive
is to claim an eye for an eye-and, logi-cally, a murder for a murder, a rape
for a rape, a re-prisal barbarity for brutal burglary and so on. Sooth-ing for
the sadist, heartening to the little Hitler lin-gering in many bosoms, this
form of blood-thirsty justice, which still is prevalent in a few countries,
has become obsolete, what with the dignity and worth of the human person receiving
better recognition in civilised societies responsive to the new international
legal order. Not quite dead is lex talionis, as is evident from the lively controversy
about death penalty.

"What purpose
does the infliction of suffering on law-breakers serve? Tappan has offered
on incisive summary of the purposes of punishment. He notes that punishment
is designed to achieve the goal of retribution or social retaliation against
the offen-der. Punishment also involves incapacitation, which prevents the
violator from misbehaving during the time he is being punished. Additionally,
punishment is supposed to have a deterrent effect, both on the law-breaker
and on. potential misbehaviors. Indi-vidual or specific deterrence may be
achieved by intimidation of the person, frightening him against further misbehavior,
or it may be effected through reformation, in which the law-breaker changes
his deviant sentiments. General deterrance results from the warning offered
to potential criminals by the example of punishment directed at a specific
wrongdoer." - - - -

The theory that
savagery must be fought by sava-gery dies hard and if that philosophy holds
good, judges must welcome prison torture and police third degree. Anyway, these
primitive strands of thinking, decked in different apparel, are found among
judicial, legislative and executive agencies. Is this our penal policy? Then,
do jail the delinquent in, gouge his ey4 publicly flog him, dismember his limbs
and hang him to the delectation of ghoulish crowds. Blinding Bhagalpur justice
par excellence.

British justice
once hanged even children for petty offences and some great judges were unhappy
when some in the long list of capital sentence offences were sought to be jettisoned.
"Sir Rober Peel regarded it 'as a most dangerous experiment' when stealing
£5 from a dwelling-house ceased to be a capital offence. Lord Ellenborough,
the Lord Chief Justice of his day, thought transportation as a punishment for
stealing 5s. from a shop was a quite inadequate substitute for the death penalty,
and the Solicitor-General, Sir William Garrow, argued passionately - that the
Government could not exist without the protection of drawing and quartering."

England has replaced
the gallows by prisons, and a macabre mix of retaliatory cruelty and deterrent
confinement defiles prison management. In many countries, long terms behind
bars, harsh and humiliat-ing regimen like solitary confinement and fetters all
over, deprivations of basic needs to deepen the punitive thrust became the "zoological"
penal policy em-bittering the culprit. Wincfred A. Elken writes -

"At the
turn of the century, a government com-mittee was set up to investigate the
work of the pri-sons. What impressed its members was not the deterrent value
of imprisonment, but the extent to which the prisoners were brutalised and
demorali-lised by their experience. The prisons were in fact breeding grounds
of crime.

"The deterrent
theory seems in fact to lead to an inevitable dilemma. Crime continues in spite
of punishment and the logical answer is to make the punishments even more severe.
Ultimately the point is reached when the demoralization produced by these punishments
becomes too glaringly obvious and the administrators of justice and the public
become sickened by what the law demands. Ex-perience has in fact shown that
the purely repressive punishments are neither necessary nor effective."

The champions of
severity of infliction, corporal or in-prison, as possessing a deterrent potential
have, lost the battle by now, because crimes have been increasing despite heavy
penalties. A variety of re-asons renders impotent these draconian penal prescriptions,
including the venality of investigative
agencies, the judicial distance between the first charge and final guilt and
the easy purchase of acquittals or light sentences, through clever lawyering